[mirror-admin] mirroring containers?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 7 November 2016 at 09:58, Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone. I'm not sure how much all of you have been following the
> work in Fedora around the future of the operating system. The short
> version, which is probably not at all surprising if you've been within
> five miles of industry buzz, is that we're looking at an immutable core
> with modules on top of that delivered as containers.
>
> "Delivered as containers" is where the mirror list comes in. The
> containers in question would be OCI bundles — an archive plus metadata.
> In principle, this isn't much different from an RPM. In the future, we
> might want to move to ostrees, which look more like git trees on the
> server. This will include both server applications and services
> (Docker) and desktop apps (in Flatpak format).
>
> I don't propose we put it into the same "fedora enchilada" rsync target
> with traditional Fedora, but some new thing. This would include modules
> that are necessary for any functionality above the minimal core (which
> we hope to be really minimal, so functioning Fedora Server for any
> practical application will require some modules) as well as basically
> all the application software we build for Fedora today. (Starting
> smaller but growing to that.)
>
> The question is: what's your enthusiasm for mirroring this?
>

I think it is hard to answer that question without a couple of things:

1) How much disk space are you looking at?
2) How many files in that disk space are you looking at?
3) How much churn and what kind of churn is it going to be? If the
file names stay the same but the contents change then it could be
possible to save via rsync delta patching but if it is completely
different files then its pure downloads each time.
4) How do mirrors advertise this to customers?


> We are also looking at *sharing* this with CentOS, because in the
> modular/container world, it should be easy to mix and match, running an
> CentOS-based application you need to not change versions for a long
> time on top of a Fedora base for hardware enablement, or a Fedora-based
> application you want to be cutting edge on top of a stable CentOS (or
> RHEL!) core. Basically, like EPEL taken to the next level. Would this
> make you more (or less?) interested?
>
> --
> Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> Fedora Project Leader
>
> --



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

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